# Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato) - How the U.S. Helped Destroy Brazil's Democracy

**Channel:** George of Patmos
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRC3PBjthxI
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/hRC3PBjthxI

## Chapters

- 0:00 — Brazil's January 8th Riot Context
- 4:04 — Operation Car Wash Propaganda Machine
- 6:10 — Lula, Dilma, and US Pressure
- 11:51 — How Car Wash Built Its Myth
- 15:47 — Dilma's Impeachment and Coup
- 27:34 — The Framing of Lula's Case
- 41:39 — Lula Convicted and Media Cheers
- 50:29 — Bolsonaro Rises After Lula's Jailing
- 1:04:40 — Leaks Expose Car Wash Collusion
- 1:08:18 — Lula Returns and US Hypocrisy
- 1:15:20 — Corruption Narratives as Neoliberalism
- 1:24:41 — Operation Car Wash Summary
- 1:29:02 — Closing Thoughts and Credits

## Transcript

**[0:00]:** This video was made possible thanks to my supporters on Patreon and Coffee. On January 8th, 2023, a mob stormed the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, hoping that doing so might somehow nullify the result of the 2022 election and return the previous president, Jair Bolsonaro, to power. They quickly discovered that trashing some empty buildings and just kind of standing around while posting Instagram stories is not how you seize state power. Rather, it's how you get yourselves arrested and thrown into jail. This collective delusion, reminiscent of the January 6th, 2021 Capitol riot in the USA, was immediately denounced by much of the mainstream media and many governments worldwide. Even US President Joe Biden came forward to throw his support behind the recently elected president, Lula, and denounce the rioters. And the US media backed this same position, bemoaning the threat to Brazil's democracy that such actions represented and broadly repudiating them.

**[1:03]:** While acting bewildered at how things got to this point in the first place. But it's actually very clear how things got to this point, and they know it, too. But they're not going to say it, because it's in large part because of the broad, enthusiastic, full-throated support that they've all offered to the right-wing lawfare campaign to destroy the Brazilian left and the country's supposed democracy for a very long time. The same campaign that brought Bolsonaro to power in the first place. It's because of this, this, this, this, this, this. I could go on all day. The destruction of Brazilian democracy for the benefit of the country's oligarchy and international corporations was carried out in plain view for all to see in Brazil's courts by corrupt, right-wing aligned judges and prosecutors, while they were simultaneously being profiled as superheroes crusading for justice in the Western media and supported in their efforts throughout by the US government during both the Obama and Trump administrations.

**[2:06]:** And they would still be doing much the same today if not for a series of coincidences that made it temporarily untenable. In this video, we will be destroying the myth of Lava Jato, known as Operation Car Wash in English, the supposed anti-corruption campaign by Brazil's judiciary, which was from the very beginning a transparent front to bring down the overwhelmingly popular center-left Workers' Party through undemocratic means with the full support of Western governments and media throughout. The media's endless conveyor belt of gushing news articles and corporate-funded propaganda was combined with the USA's diplomatic approval and material backing to create a public perception of Car Wash not as the right-wing lawfare campaign that it was, but rather as some sort of core room Marvel movie with the good guys, fascist judicial operatives, fighting against the bad guys, left-leaning politicians who are considered too radical by the Brazilian right and by Washington because they want to do

**[3:07]:** things like maintain some national sovereignty and raise taxes on the rich by 1% to fund a $50 monthly stipend for single mothers. They even managed to fool known critical thinker Jimmy Dore with one of their propaganda videos with inspiring background music. Welcome to Força-Tarefa da Lava Jato, also known as the Car Wash Task Force. This group of legal warriors in the progressive city of Curitiba are uncovering the biggest corruption scheme in the history of Brazil, maybe even the world. Lava Jato has become a work of art itself with broad support of the public. Lava Jato bumper stickers are everywhere. Judge Moro has become a folk hero. And Deltan has a best-selling book on the operation.

**[4:04]:** Wow. That's kind of a I don't know. That kind of That's amazing. Yeah, I know. That's amazing. I want to get a Lava Jato t-shirt. Yeah, me too. Yeah, I really want one. So, Lava Jato is that's car wash, I guess, in whatever they speak Spanish, but I think they speak Portuguese, right? Portuguese, I think. in Brazil. Wow, indeed. Who among us cannot say that this video didn't make us want to get a t-shirt announcing our support for a far-right campaign to destroy the Brazilian left-wing and bring the most ghoulish neoliberals imaginable into power so that they can implement policies that ruin the lives of the poor for the benefit of the rich. Who among us? By the way, what language do they even speak there? All of this propaganda cover provided Car Wash with the crucial international legitimacy that it needed to go beyond the front of targeting individual legislators and executives for relatively minor and common instances of kickbacks and bribery and take the

**[4:59]:** huge step of inventing completely trumped-up charges against the biggest center-left political figures in the country who represented the only mild opposition to Brazil being turned into a theme park for international corporations and subject to complete and total Western geopolitical hegemony. This resulted in the overthrow of a sitting president, Dilma Rousseff, in 2016 and the jailing of former president Lula da Silva in 2018. Lula was the leading candidate in the 2018 election and his jailing handed that election to the same Bolsonaro that the US government and Western media now suddenly performatively denounce. The insinuations and allegations made against Lula and Dilma were presented as if they were true from the very beginning, and they often still are even today, despite the fact that there was never any evidence backing them even back then, and that it's since been made even clearer that it was all just BS.

**[5:59]:** And we're going to be going over all of that in depth in this video.

**[6:10]:** So, before continuing with the video, I just wanted to clarify something. I sometimes get comments from people who say that they have trouble following along with the text on the screen in my videos. So, I just wanted to know that to follow along with this video, you don't need to read everything that shows up on the screen. It's mostly just there either to provide a source for what I'm saying, which you can cross-check if you want, or as a sort of non-essential visual aid sort of thing. Think of it sort of like a PowerPoint presentation. You don't need to follow it all along perfectly, so don't worry if you can't or don't want to. Anyway, so without further ado, let's get right down to the video. Lula da Silva, a former union leader and victim of torture at the hands of the country's US-backed fascist military dictatorship, was the president of Brazil from 2003 until 2010, winning both the 2002 election and his 2006 re-election in

**[7:04]:** landslides. Lula became by far the most popular politician in Brazil simply by implementing some social welfare reforms in a country full of people who desperately needed such assistance, along with moving the country a bit away from the rabid free market capitalism that had characterized it for the previous decade or so. He also adopted a foreign policy that was much more independent from the whims of the USA than they would have liked. The US has long been the primary sponsor of the right-wing in Brazil to the extent that they had helped to install and then backed the very anti-left dictatorship that had tortured Lula. The very clear improvements to the lives of normal people during Lula's 8 years in office were plain to see and are still well remembered by the countless millions of Brazilians who benefited. Lula's advocacy for Latin American and global South unity to counter the status quo of US dominance obviously got the USA's attention.

**[8:01]:** Leaked cables from the US ambassador to Brazil during his presidency revealed complaints that Brazil, rather than sticking to the US foreign policy line, was trying to build strong relations with other global South countries and Latin American countries to try and be a friend of both the United States and its adversaries, rather than just one of the two. He also suggested that going forward, the USA should interfere in Brazilian politics by drawing in its Congress, its judiciary, governors, and non-governmental players, and the private sector in particular, which generally support work with the United States and often have the ability to sway decisions in favor of our initiatives. And as we're about to see, in particular with the bringing in its judiciary part, that is precisely what they ended up doing through their support of Operation Car Wash. Lula was succeeded as the presidential candidate of the Workers' Party by Dilma Rousseff, who then won the party's third consecutive presidential election in 2010.

**[9:07]:** Lula himself was unable to run again due to the two-term limit. Dilma's presidency was not quite as much of a revelation as Lula's was, in part because Lula had already done much of what a center-left president could reasonably do in a country dominated by corporate interests that also has the USA breathing down its neck at all times. So, she mostly just tried to protect and maintain the popular reforms that Lula had instituted. This was enough for her to win re-election in 2014, the fourth straight electoral victory for the Workers' Party, which gave them and Dilma a mandate until 2018. Not so coincidentally, 2014 was also the year in which Sergio Moro became the head judge of Lava Jato, Operation Car Wash in English, a federal corruption investigation largely centered on the state oil company Petrobras. The specific targeting of Petrobras is not a coincidence. The fact that the energy industry is dominated by a state company in Brazil, one which was also greatly strengthened during Lula and Dilma's tenures, has long been a sore spot for the USA, which would prefer that its own

**[10:19]:** companies have free reign over Brazil's resources. That's why the American NSA undertook a massive spying and espionage campaign against Petrobras and Dilma's government. This operation involved the very misleadingly named National Security Agency hacking into Petrobras's computer systems. The US also bugged the personal and work phones of President Dilma and dozens of other officials of the Workers' Party government, listening in on tens of thousands of their calls. They had a particular interest in spying on those who were involved in economic matters. All in all, it was a spying scandal of massive proportions and an egregious violation of Brazil's sovereignty, which should have resulted in huge repercussions for the US. However, outrage over this massive scandal was quickly swept under the rug as Moro swooped in to take media attention away from it with the Car Wash investigation in 2014. This helped greatly to distract from the spying scandal as he tried to target the Workers' Party government and Petrobras, both of which the US had just been caught systematically spying on.

**[11:30]:** As we'll go over in more depth in a bit, the Car Wash team also met with the US Department of Justice and FBI in secret. Given that we know, due to the spying scandal, that the USA was in possession of massive troves of hacked information from Petrobras, the timing and secrecy of this initiative was very suspect.

**[11:51]:** Moro's team began charging and ruling against an unusually high amount of politicians and businessmen accused of corruption in a very short amount of time. This was suspicious, given that corruption cases are often very complex. There was little chance that every defendant was really being given a fair assessment in the time that it was taking him to reach verdicts or coerce plea deals. These charges were often backed by little to no evidence, and indeed, in the vast majority of cases, the Car Wash team didn't actually seem to want them to go to trial. Their strategy was rather to insinuate and threaten in the hope that those targeted by the investigation would take a plea deal. So, they incentivized their targets to implicate others, hoping that this would eventually result in someone revealing or inventing a story that could be used to indict high-level Workers' Party politicians like Lula and Dilma.

**[12:46]:** Core to this strategy was one Brazilian law which says that it is a crime when anyone prevents or in any way hinders the investigation of a criminal offense involving a criminal organization. This law, which is as vague as it sounds, was used against targets whom the Car Wash team could not reasonably accuse of corruption. If they refused to talk or insisted they knew nothing, that meant that they themselves could be charged for refusing to talk or claiming to know nothing. So, the threat of using that law against them could be used to coerce often entirely made up testimony, which incriminated others. Moro created a false image of being efficient as a result of the incredibly high number of cases that he was breezing through. And he used this to attempt to turn himself into a media darling and his trials into media circuses. Someone being a celebrity prosecutor would already be pretty bad and likely compromise their work, but a celebrity judge who was personally involved in the investigation itself and who had the sole authority to dictate verdicts on highly politically charged

**[13:55]:** cases is many degrees worse. The conflict of interest was already super obvious, even in the early days of Operation Car Wash. The Brazilian media, of course mostly owned by massive corporations as in most countries, were nonetheless happy to lap all of this up. They enthusiastically helped Moro to cultivate an image of some sort of a political superman judge who was just a neutral crusader against the evils of corruption. This was then, of course, picked up by the Western and especially US media. For example, a profile in the Washington Post was headlined, "Brazil's new hero is a nerdy judge who is tough on official corruption." Dear God. A glowing Reuters article presented Moro as a tenacious judge who was meticulous, formal, and reserved. And Time magazine named him as one of their 100 most influential people with their profile of him simply called "Cleaning Up Corruption."

**[14:54]:** This was only the beginning of the nauseating, uncritical backing that the international media would give to Operation Car Wash. Scarcely anyone even saw fit to question the prevailing narrative at the time, even despite the obvious problems with the investigation that I just went over and will continue going over here. And also despite the fact that as early as 2004, Moro had already written an article where he advocated for the exact strategies that he used during Operation Car Wash, distorting the law to demonize his targets, discarding the presumption of innocence that defendants are entitled to under Brazilian law, and manipulating public opinion to get favorable media coverage to pressure other branches of government into doing what he wanted, and to delegitimize defendants, especially by strategically filtering supposed leaks to the media to make them look bad.

**[15:47]:** By mid to late 2015, the hysteria and fanfare around Car Wash was such that everyone was having a good old time accusing practically any even slightly left-wing political figure of undefined corruption whenever they felt like it. And it wasn't just the media, either. Social media, influenced by them, of course, erupted even more. Everyone from teenagers struggling to deal with the information overload of the modern internet to bored grandmas who usually posted about their cake recipes started sharing every unsourced post they saw with allegations against Workers' Party politicians. They were painted as demonic beasts who fed off corruption, who were irresponsible with public funds because they redistributed them to the poor. The specter of corruption in Latin America has always primarily been used to demonize the very notion of public spending in of itself, and especially public spending to help those who the upper classes consider undesirable.

**[16:45]:** And just like the judges and prosecutors of Car Wash themselves, no one, not on social media nor the journalists of the mainstream media, felt much of a need to provide any meaningful evidence for such lofty allegations. These sorts of vague insinuations about corruption were the core justifications used for the right-wing anti-Workers' Party protest movement that came to a head in 2015 and 2016. These protests originally started out as more general unrest related to economic downturn during Dilma's administration, but was soon hijacked and turned into an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. Under the surface, they were driven by resentment of the economic advancement of previously poor families during the Workers' Party's governments. Many people with inherited generational wealth considered the ascent of these people from poverty and into the lower middle class as an affront to their privileges. They were enraged by the sight of darker-skinned people using their newly found disposable income to enjoy vacations, shopping centers, decent restaurants, etc.

**[17:50]:** As researchers Stuart Davis and Joe Straubhaar wrote, "General grievances about cost of living and unsatisfactory government services were slowly overtaken by middle and upper middle class grievances with the Workers' Party government, especially its involvement in corruption and concern about losses of key aspects of middle class status. The established middle class resented the loss of some of their privileges as members of the new lower middle class began crowding malls, roads, and airports." Furthermore, with the inflation of wages, it was harder and more expensive to hire household help. Though in isolation, none of these individual factors provided the single catalyst for the widespread anti-Workers' Party protests, they combined to create a marked sense of middle and upper middle class frustration. This frustration would later be echoed in 2020 when Bolsonaro's Minister of Economics, Paulo Guedes, said that one of the problems with the Workers' Party's governance was that even domestic workers could take vacations to Disney World, apparently genuinely thinking

**[18:55]:** that everyone else would understand that as a negative thing as he had. The right-wing protest movement, combined with the Car Wash and Juice Drive to brand everyone in the Workers' Party as corrupt, to inspire a flurry of political opportunism. There was nothing whatsoever even remotely linking President Dilma Rousseff to any acts of corruption, but by this point, all you needed were insinuations and vibes to brand someone as corrupt. So, in 2015, centrist and right-wing politicians teamed up to ride that wave and impeach Dilma. They knew that if this initiative was successful, it would force her out years before her term was due to end, which would mean that her right-wing neoliberal vice president, Michel Temer, would take over and get around 2 years in the presidency as a result. Plenty of time to try and dismantle the Workers' Party's achievements by decree. Temer held this position because the Workers' Party often chooses opponents as vice presidents in an effort to appeal to more centrist voters.

**[19:57]:** This strategy had worked well for Lula during his presidency, but for Dilma, well, not so much. And so, in December of 2015, the impeachment of Dilma began. This initiative was headed by Eduardo Cunha, a conservative evangelical Christian who himself was being investigated for corruption at the time, and who was a member of Temer's political party. A contemporaneous article by the Washington Post went over the reasons given by Cunha and his allies for impeaching Dilma. It's an absolutely hilarious article, which, out of all the horrible cover that the US media gave for the anti-left prosecution campaign in Brazil, I think is actually the worst one that I've read, and that's saying a lot. It tried desperately to spin the impeachment allegations, which were fundamentally just accusing Dilma of doing something that was objectively good, as somehow valid, dire, and actually very, very serious and definitely meriting of her overthrow.

**[20:55]:** It states, "What did Rousseff actually do wrong? She is being accused of using state-controlled banks to finance popular social programs without revealing she was doing so." Alarm bells started ringing over her government's creative accounting in 2013. A prime example is a flagship program for Rousseff's government called the Bolsa Familia, or family allowance, in which the government gives cash to poor Brazilian families provided that they send their children to school and ensure they get vaccinations. Typically, authorities give the money to a bank, which distributes it to families. The bank started complaining from 2013 that it wasn't getting regular payments from the government and was having to use its own money to make the payments. In Portuguese, this is called pedaling. Actually, it was more like running up a giant overdraft. In 2014, the problem got worse. There were tens of billions of dollars in late payments for programs like these that the banks were left paying for.

**[21:53]:** Rousseff's accusers say that she did this so she could spend more money on vote-winning social programs in 2014, the year in which she narrowly won re-election. That sounds pretty serious. It is, but the impeachment process that Rousseff is facing only applies to her current mandate, which began on January 1st, 2015, after she won re-election. And after getting a sharp rap on the knuckles from the Federal Court of Accounts in April of last year, the government cleaned up its act, paying off most of its pedaling debts. As soon as the Federal Court of Accounts said it was not allowed, the government stopped doing it, said one professor of financial law. The media and the Brazilian right tried very hard to somehow make that sound very nefarious. And I actually intentionally chose this article as the source here to explain what they were accusing her of and read it out at length because it's obvious how spurious the allegations were, even when presented in the words of

**[22:50]:** an outlet that's clearly in favor of the process and trying to spin the allegations as serious. If you ignore the ridiculous framing and that smug commentary, what's actually said there is that the government funded welfare programs for the poor on credits which it later repaid. This is a completely normal thing to do with government spending and quite frankly, it's just a good thing. To your average neoliberal actually doing good things that people want like funding social programs is seen as dishonorable cheating. No, you can't give people social welfare because then they'll vote for you and that's not fair. The government spending money to help people was presented opposition to the Workers' Party not as a good and normal thing that any half-decent government should be doing constantly, but rather as some sort of vote buying scheme that warranted impeachment. It's apparently ridiculous claim, one that the US media evidently had to twist themselves into knots trying to justify if that Washington Post article is any indication.

**[23:51]:** Oh, and also, wait for it, later during the actual impeachment proceedings, the independent accounting experts who were called to present evidence against Dilma before the Senate, who were hired by her opponents specifically for the purpose, ended up testifying that there was actually no evidence that Dilma had ever even actually done any of this at all. Despite the allegation being both for something that wasn't even bad, that also turned out to be completely false anyway, and that had allegedly happened during her previous mandate, meaning that she technically couldn't have been impeached for it, it was still good enough for the purposes of replacing the Workers' Party government. Something which the Brazilian center and right had thus far been unable to do at the ballot box in spite of the support of their American benefactors. An impeachment, after all, is not anything resembling a fair judicial process that comes down to the strength of the charges being put forth and the weight of the evidence presented to prove them.

**[24:48]:** It rather just comes down to a vote of politicians who are obviously completely partisan. And so, after the multi-year-long US-backed right-wing delegitimization campaign of her government, there were enough votes in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies to impeach Dilma and replace her with Temer, who of course immediately formed an alliance with the PSDB, the same right-wing party who had just lost the 2014 presidential election to Dilma and the Workers' Party. This process has long since been called a coup by many, and it's easy to see why. The right was unable to beat the Workers' Party in an actual election and unable to pick Dilma with anything resembling a credible charge of corruption. So, instead, through the combination of Operation Car Wash, the elitist right-wing protests, and the media's gushing and uncritical coverage of those two things, an environment was created where a vague, indeterminate specter of corruption just sort of loomed over

**[25:46]:** her regardless. This was used to justify an obviously ludicrous impeachment process, which replaced the president with someone who was diametrically opposed to her politically. Said replacement then immediately took to trying to undo as much of what the Workers' Party had achieved over the previous 14 years in as short of a time as possible without ever having won a presidential election. You need to do some Washington Post-tier mental gymnastics to somehow rationalize that as a legitimate democratic institutional process rather than a clear-as-day parliamentary and judicial coup. Temer himself was candid about the real reason for Dilma's impeachment during his presidency. In September 2016, he flatly admitted that it really had nothing to do with supposed corruption or the supposedly nefarious act of giving poor people welfare. Rather, he said it was because the Workers' Party had refused to accept the plan of neoliberal shock treatment that his party had proposed.

**[26:44]:** He knew his time as the unelected president of Brazil would likely be short, and that it could be followed up with a return of the Workers' Party at the 2018 election. So, he made sure to make the most of it by forcing through the very plan that Dilma had refused to. This meant sweeping and hard-to-reverse neoliberal reforms, which he had absolutely no popular mandate for, such as a 20-year-long freeze on government spending, a labor law reform that shattered workers' rights, and a constitutional amendment that forces every subsequent government to abide by neoliberal fiscal austerity measures as a matter of law. They did via this coup what they could never have gotten a mandate to do at the ballot box. The US government, those fantastic defenders of democracy, unsurprisingly remained silent on all of this throughout.

**[27:34]:** There was still a big loose end, though, one that needed to be tied up if this right-wing usurpation of Brazilian politics was to last. Lula. Despite the attacks on the Workers' Party, Lula remained very popular. Many people still had very fond memories of how they'd benefited under his presidency, which at the time had only ended 6 years earlier. It was clear that the only way that the 2018 election would be won by someone who was more amenable to the Brazilian right wing and their American allies was to take Lula out of the picture somehow. And so, Sergio Moro and Car Wash stepped up, charging Lula in 2016 with corruption over a penthouse apartment that was supposedly given to him as part of a bribe from the OAS construction company. The story went that in exchange for giving them lucrative construction contracts from Petrobras, Lula received this apartment.

**[28:27]:** The problem here is that the apartment was never actually owned by Lula, nor his wife. As journalists Brian Mier and others have explained, Lula's wife, Marisa Letícia, signed a contract to pay in installments for an apartment in a building that was still under construction in 2005. The construction company, Ban Coop, went out of business in 2009 when the building was still unfinished. OAS then bought the building and took over construction. Then, in 2011, when the building was nearing completion, OAS offered them a free upgrade from their original apartment to a penthouse apartment. Lula had already left office, so this was completely legal, and there was no evidence whatsoever to link this offer to any corruption. OAS likely simply thought that they could sell more apartments in the building if people knew that the most popular president in Brazil's history was living in the penthouse. Their motivation for making the offer is irrelevant, though, as Lula and Marisa did not actually accept it.

**[29:28]:** In fact, they visited the apartment only once and then decided even to back out of buying the first apartment. At no point during this process had they ever actually owned the still-under-construction original apartment nor the proposed penthouse upgrade. They had not even come close to paying their installments before they backed out, and the apartment had only ever been owned by Bancoop and then OAS, no individuals. In 2021, a São Paulo court ruled exactly this: that Lula and Marisa had never even owned the first apartment, let alone the penthouse that they were accused of accepting a bribe for. The court found that they had backed out of the purchase in 2015, long before the investigation had even begun, and that they, nor any of their family members, had ever occupied it. It was then subsequently ruled that the company had to refund them for the installments they had paid up to that point.

**[30:24]:** Though, it's ridiculous that such rulings ever even needed to be made, given the fact that even when Lula was indicted back in 2016, it was already completely in the open that they had never actually owned the apartment that they were accused of accepting as a bribe. And they could never even have been involved in such bribery, anyway, because they were unemployed civilians at the time of the alleged offense. The case began a year after the couple had already backed out of the sale, and photos taken of the penthouse apartment, which they supposedly owned, showed it to be unfinished and in a state of disuse and neglect, as you would expect, considering the apartment had never been sold and no one had ever actually lived there. Additionally, in a completely ridiculous move that really demonstrates just how frivolous this case always was, the prosecution tried to claim that this supposed bribe was received by Lula in 2014, and that it had been agreed to 6 years

**[31:18]:** earlier. This means it would have been arranged in 2008, when the building was still owned by BanKooP, an entirely separate company. Apparently, Lula and Marisa are so good at corruption that they organized for OAS to bribe them with an apartment before OAS even owned the apartment. What happened is pretty clearly just that the Car Wash team wanted to charge and convict Lula, and they knew that all they really needed to do was to get him into a courtroom before Moro. Once they'd surmounted that hurdle, the quality of the evidence wouldn't matter. All they needed to do was create a plausible enough sounding story for the public and media. So, after finding out that he and his wife had backed out of buying an apartment, they decided that using that as a basis would be good enough. This is further evidenced by the fact that the Car Wash team have, over the years, and currently tried to charge Lula with clandestinely owning just about any property that he's ever set foot in.

**[32:16]:** If Lula went on holiday once to a friend's house, they would indict him under suspicion that he owned it and had received it as a bribe. If Lula once did a U-turn in someone's driveway, they would investigate the property and check to see if they could somehow spin it into another case against him. This happened about half a dozen times, though they eventually settled on the apartment as their primary case and quietly dropped the others. Yet, despite the clear joke that these allegations always were, they were reported on by the international media as if they were true from the very beginning. They didn't feel any need to engage in the most fundamental journalistic practice of actually looking at the evidence at any point. In the Atlantic, for example, in an article where they do at least note the clear violations of due process, the partiality of the judge, and the violations of the most basic legal procedures by the Car Wash team, they

**[33:10]:** nonetheless still decided to claim that there was an abundance of evidence that Lula was guilty. A statement which they did not feel any need to justify as they didn't actually cite any of that alleged evidence. The supposed existence of damning evidence that proved Lula's guilt was simply taken as a given and it never needed to actually be shown. And that's obviously very intentional because they quite simply wanted to paint Lula as being guilty. The evidence didn't matter to them. There was practically no discussion in the mainstream international media at the time about the complete lack of evidence for the charges against Lula or really any that even questioned the evidence at all. At most, all they did was question the conduct of the Car Wash team, not so much because they actually thought it was bad, but rather because they thought that it was compromising a slam-dunk case against Lula.

**[34:02]:** Again, this wasn't a mistake, it was very intentional. It was the narrative that they wanted people to believe in. Over the next 2 years, despite the complete lack of evidence, the case was turned into a spectacle by the Brazilian and international media with the judges and prosecutors of Car Wash treated as the heroes and Lula as the villain. Wild allegations were presented in the press practically weekly and the Car Wash team took full advantage of the limelight giving constant presentations before the media, both local and international, turning a vague allegation of corruption into a veritable media circus. In one of the most ridiculous examples of this, the head prosecutor on the case, Deltan Dallagnol, presented to the media a PowerPoint slide with a bunch of circles with bad words written inside them that all pointed towards a circle with Lula written in the middle. The accusation against Lula was that he had taken an apartment as a bribe, yet somehow the Car Wash team managed to spin this to the media as Lula being the head of a vast criminal organization that had done

**[35:04]:** every bad thing one could ever imagine, few of which were even remotely related to what they were actually accusing him of. Dallagnol would later be found guilty of liable for this act, but at the time it was the clearest representation of the sort of frenzy that the Car Wash team was trying to drum up. Their goal was not to actually charge Lula for anything for which there was actually any evidence of his guilt. It was simply to create enough of an image of guilt to allow them to convict him of whatever they could get to stick for just long enough that he would not be able to run for president in the 2018 election. And that's precisely what they did. In spite of the fact that the alleged crime would have taken place in São Paulo, where the apartment is located, the Car Wash team instead filed it in the city of Curitiba in Paraná state, where Judge Moro and

**[35:53]:** the prosecutors were based. They had continuously done this with practically every Car Wash case as well, regardless of where crimes had actually taken place. It was incredibly obvious that they were jurisdiction shopping to ensure that Moro would judge their cases, and this was highly illegal. The only thing that could have made it legal was a very sketchy 2015 law that dictated that corruption charges with proven links to Petrobras were to be tried by the Car Wash team in Paraná. However, there was no evidence of the he Petrobras link in Lula's case. So, in a completely ridiculous maneuver, they decided to add a supposed Petrobras link to the case. Said frivolous addition enabled them to file the apartment case in Paraná instead of São Paulo, after which they quietly removed it. Moro later admitted straight up in one of his rulings that there was no proof that the supposed bribe had any relation to Petrobras, meaning that he was well aware that he had no jurisdiction on the case, yet had

**[36:55]:** presided over it anyway. Nonetheless, international media outlets continued to claim that the case was connected to a supposed 88 million real Petrobras corruption scheme, which the Car Wash team had invented for the purposes of jurisdiction shopping years after they had dropped that allegation themselves. All of this was obviously just incredibly messed up. Their actions were intentionally taken to ensure that the case would be judged by Moro and prosecuted by his own team. The evidence presented by the prosecution could have been a crudely drawn MS Paint picture of a butt, and Moro still would have ruled Lula guilty, and the media still would have presented it as irrefutable proof that he was. Moro and the Car Wash team knew that this would be impossible to justify if any challenge to it was judged before the 2018 election. So, they illegally wiretapped Lula and his family's residences and offices and his legal team's offices to ensure that they could preempt any attempt to contest the irregularities in their handling of the case.

**[37:58]:** This wiretapping continued throughout the entire case, meaning that the prosecution was fully informed of the defense's legal strategy throughout the trial. By this point, the Car Wash investigation had already long been tied to the US Department of Justice and FBI. Leaked documents revealed by The Intercept show that the FBI and Department of Justice secretly worked with the Car Wash Task Force, Doing so in a highly illegal manner. Judicial cooperation with foreign officials must be authorized by Brazil's Ministry of Justice. Yet FBI and DOJ agents were regularly flying to Parana to meet with the car wash team and intentionally keeping these meetings secret. Eduardo Carosso, the Justice Minister at the time, only found out about the visits when he was informed by the Federal Police, who themselves only found out by coincidence because they thought it was weird that so many Americans were visiting judges and prosecutors so frequently.

**[38:56]:** Head prosecutor Dallagnol himself admitted that they were intentionally hiding these illegal meetings in group chats that would later be leaked. I don't like the idea of the executive looking at our requests and knowing what's up. Dallagnol had extra incentives to keep everything secret, too, because the Americans were planning to pay him and the other prosecutors with lucrative kickbacks from fines that would be paid to the US by Petrobras as a result of their cases in Brazil. The prosecutors planned to use this money to create an anti-corruption consultancy business with themselves at the head and discussed in detail how best they could structure this company to make it look less suspicious. So the car wash team had financial incentive to help the USA to destroy their own country's state oil company. Both during these meetings and beforehand, the Americans coached the car wash team on the strategic use of plea deals, which if you'll recall, was a core part of the strategy that they used to back their spurious allegations against

**[39:59]:** the Workers Party. Moro and the car wash prosecutors have also been party to American training programs since at least as far back as 2008. What a coincidence that the judges and prosecutors with the most history with the USA just so happened to be the ones to carry out the car wash investigation. And the FBI and DOJ even approached the car wash team regarding the apartment investigation specifically a month before it was launched. And then secretly requested and illegally received updates on said investigation from them. So, let's put all of this together. The US government had long bemoaned the strength of Petrobras and the policies of the Workers' Party and had as early as 2006 called for a multi-pronged strategy involving the judiciary to force Brazil's government to adopt the American line. Then in 2015, just 2 years after a massive long-standing American espionage operation targeting Petrobras and the Workers' Party was exposed, the US was suddenly secretly sending agents to meet with the car wash team who also just happened to

**[41:08]:** be going after Petrobras and the Workers' Party exactly as the US was. And these American agents also just happened to show a special interest in Lula's case in particular. The collusion really couldn't be more obvious. And this is all just based off the very limited selection of documents that happened to have been leaked despite the attempts by those involved to keep them secret. There's doubtlessly even more damning evidence that's still classified which the USA and other parties are unlikely to ever voluntarily release.

**[41:39]:** In 2017, after a year of this blatant show trial, Sergio Moro ruled that Lula was guilty. Lula's wife and the former first lady of Brazil, Marisa Letícia, didn't live to see this verdict as she died in early 2017 following a stroke. This occurred just a few days after a raid on their home to which Moro had of course invited the media to gawk at the spectacle. Lula has long held that her death was caused by the constant judicial harassment of her and her family. Moro sentenced Lula to 10 years in prison, a sentence more than long enough to ensure that he had practically no chance of participating in the 2018 election as the appeals process was sure to take at least a year or two during which he would be barred from running. They had still completely failed to find any material evidence that Lula had ever actually owned the apartment and Moro himself even admitted that during the trial stating that this court never stated in a judgement or otherwise that the

**[42:38]:** amounts that OAS received from Petrobras have been used for the former president's undue advantage. Nonetheless, actual evidence doesn't matter as this was again a case being presented tomorrow by his own teammates. Obviously, he was always going to rule Lula guilty not just because he had desperately sought to do so this entire time but also because by this point his career depended on it. He'd hedged everything, his career and his image, on the Lula case. So not giving himself the verdict that he'd been promising would have left him in disgrace. The main piece of evidence that the prosecution presented against Lula was a testimony from the former president of OAS who claimed that Lula had owned the apartment and that he had accepted further bribery in the form of free renovations from the company. This testimony was a result of the exact sort of coerced plea bargain that the Americans had coached the Car Wash team on extracting that we went over earlier.

**[43:35]:** This witness, who had himself already been in prison for a year at the time, had changed his story multiple times before finally arriving at one that the Car Wash team liked. The one where he said exactly what they wanted him to say. Of course, at no point was he able to actually furnish any proof for these claims. They were based solely on his completely unreliable word. On the other hand, the aforementioned photos of the apartment showed that nothing even resembling renovations had even occurred since it was actually kind of trashed and clearly had never even been finished in the first place to be renovated. Though, of course, Moro refused to admit this fact as evidence. The defense attempted to counter this with 73 witnesses whose testimony contradicted that one, stating instead that they had no reason to believe that Lula had ever owned the apartment, and had never remotely accepted the free renovations on the

**[44:27]:** apartment, either, which, you know, he'd never owned. Yet, in Moro's final ruling, he makes no reference at all to these many dozens of testimonies from the witnesses called by the defense, which were, at the very least, of the same level of reliability as the few that the prosecution were relying on. Instead, he chose to extensively cite the few obviously unreliable witnesses presented by the prosecution, all of whom did nothing but cite hearsay and vibes. My favorite one of these is definitely a janitor who made the claim, without any evidence aside from his word, that everyone knew that Lula owned the apartment. During cross-examination by the defense, where they asked about his affiliation with a right-wing anti-Lula political party, which included him running for city councilor on that party's ticket under the pseudonym Alfonso, the janitor of Lula's apartment, clearly trying to take advantage of his 15 minutes of fame, he went on an anti-Workers' Party rant in the courtroom, yelling that Lula and his supporters were a pile of garbage, and bemoaning what they were doing to the country.

**[45:35]:** Moro, nonetheless, found his testimony not only admissible, but cited it as supposed evidence in his ruling more than a dozen times. Very good impartial witnesses, my friends. We can definitely rely on their word. And even if these testimonies had actually been presented by individuals without clear conflicts of interest hanging over their heads, there still would not have been even remotely enough evidence that the supposed bribery had ever taken place, given that there was still no material evidence whatsoever. The word of a few people who claim they fought Lula owned the apartment obviously does not even come close to proving that he'd ever actually owned it, nor that he had ever been bribed with it or renovations for it. Moro and his prosecutors had failed to establish even the most basic facts regarding the alleged acts that the case was meant to be prosecuting. Like when did the bribery happen, how did it happen, and where did it happen?

**[46:31]:** That sort of outline is required to even begin a case in the first place, let alone actually land a conviction. They are crucial for establishing basic prerequisites to a trial even taking place, like the statute of limitations and the jurisdiction. Yet the case not only went forward without even establishing the basics, but it convicted Lula without them. Because it was entirely under the purview of Moro and his handpicked team of prosecutors led by Dallagnol, who were presenting the case before Moro himself anyway, who was also deciding the verdict at his sole personal discretion. Given that the basic facts of the case had not even been established, let alone proven, Moro knew that lying and claiming in his ruling that the specific acts that Lula was accused of had been proven would likely get him in hot water later down the line, as that would mean that any further cases would rest on that evidence for which there was none.

**[47:24]:** As legal expert Fernando Hideo Lacerda noted, material proof that Lula had received the apartment from OAS and that OAS had received contracts from Petrobras as a result were both prerequisites for a conviction. Moro and his team lacked anything of the sort. So, to get around this, Moro did not even try to claim to have anything resembling such proof in his ruling. He instead opted to note that he was convicting Lula of indeterminate acts of corruption. The international media, of course, reported on all of this uncritically as if the conviction passed by Moro was by itself definitive proof that Lula was guilty as charged. He really did take that apartment as a bribe. It's that simple. For example, a Washington Post article said just 6 months before the elections that brought Bolsonaro to power that Lula's imprisonment was a turning point for Brazil and approvingly quoted Moro throughout.

**[48:21]:** While another article in The New Yorker declared the conviction the most important in Brazil's history. Even before these articles were published, there was already ample evidence that the case was politically motivated and a simple glance at the evidence presented against Lula, even in Moro's ruling on the case, showed that its entire basis was completely bogus. Yet, the entire English language media establishment worldwide was simply happy to take the Car Wash team at its word for years and years in spite of the very clear reasons to doubt them all without ever actually taking a look at the evidence or lack thereof due to their bias against the targets. And US government officials proudly bragged about their involvement in Lula's conviction. Kenneth A. Blanco, US Assistant Attorney General since 2008, who held the position during both the Obama and Trump presidencies and all throughout the American support for Car Wash, openly celebrated the role the US had played in helping the Car Wash

**[49:21]:** team put Lula behind bars during an event held by the US government adjacent Atlantic Council think tank. I'll let him speak for himself on this one. Our respective enforcement agencies continue to cooperate fully with one another and help achieve astonishing results. Brazilian prosecutors and law enforcement have been at the forefront of the anti-corruption fight in the past few years and have exemplified what a prosecutor and law enforcement agent should be. Indeed, this past week, the prosecutors in Brazil won a guilty verdict against former president Lula da Silva, who was charged with receiving bribes from the engineering firm OAS in return for helping his helping in winning contracts with the state oil company Petrobras. It's a case that this part put Brazil at the forefront of countries that are working to fight corruption. The chief of the FBI's international corruption unit, Leslie Backshies, openly took credit for looting Petrobras of nearly a billion dollars and also bragged that her team had helped topple presidents in Brazil.

**[50:26]:** So, yeah, they were just kind of open with it all.

**[50:29]:** Lula's subsequent absence in the 2018 election meant that it was open season for right-wing candidates. His imprisonment directly enabled the victory of Jair Bolsonaro, a classic 1970s Latin American fascist, the kind who the Americans had helped to bring to power across the continent in a series of bloody military coups, including in Brazil. Bolsonaro mixed that typical conservatism, religious zeal, violent hatred of anything remotely left-wing, love of the military, and neoliberal economics with one of his own personal quirks, a lack of knowing when to shut up. Bolsonaro was probably not precisely who the Car Wash team had in mind when they envisioned the candidate who Lula's imprisonment would bring to the presidency. It's more likely they were expecting someone with similar politics, but a bit more tact, an established mainstream opposition politician from one of the more traditional political parties who didn't say the quiet parts out loud.

**[51:25]:** But, Bolsonaro was nonetheless clearly far more preferable for them and their American allies than the return of the Workers' Party was, which is why Sergio Moro himself immediately joined Bolsonaro's government as his Minister of Justice. The 100% definitely apolitical judge, presented in the international media as some sort of neutral, heroic, anti-corruption crusader was curiously handed an incredibly important ministerial post in the government of the man who he put into power. The American media was, nonetheless, optimistic about Bolsonaro's appointment due to his supposedly good economic policy of doing everything possible to help the rich make more money. The New York Times gushed over the good response of corporations to a potential Bolsonaro victory. Bloomberg, the voice of the ultra-rich, was practically giddy with delight at the fact that he'd appointed a certified Chicago boy as his economics minister. And the Financial Times approved of his neoliberalism, saying that his success depended on how well he would carry out his plans of privatization and the gutting of the welfare state.

**[52:34]:** And it kind of goes without saying that the US government at the time, being led by Donald Trump, was very happy about this all, too. Former Prosecutor General of Brazil, Rodrigo Janot, himself deeply involved in Operation Car Wash, admitted in a book he wrote about the task force that the US was helping with Car Wash to push their geopolitical goals and were hoping to use it as a prototype that could also be applied to other countries in the region. The Americans have always been aware of this geopolitical aspect of Car Wash. In several conversations we had with representatives of the US government, their interest in the success of the operation was clear. As this would have repercussions on other countries in the region. They told us, "You go ahead, you are going to do this work, and this will have repercussions in other countries." Coincidentally, right-wing judicial operatives in other Latin American countries quickly took to starting similar politically motivated trials in the same vein with the same US backing.

**[53:35]:** Janot was also very open about exactly why the Americans were helping them with the investigation. He wrote, "Obviously, the Americans did not want Car Wash to succeed because they were nice, but rather because they were interested in opening up Latin American economies for their companies." Now, let's fast forward a bit to the coup de grâce to any notion that Car Wash was ever anything but a campaign of political persecution against the left. As if that's not already abundantly clear with everything we've gone over here, I just want to emphasize that I haven't even shared the smoking gun yet, but it's already incredibly obvious. Even the most basic cursory look at the case would have made its holes abundantly clear even before this. And the very visible partisan conduct of the Car Wash team only made that more obvious. Moro, the judge on the case who had the sole say over its verdict, constantly went to the media to make negative statements about Lula, attended the events of right-wing political parties, and frequently made public appearances alongside right-wing figures

**[54:39]:** who were vocal opponents of Lula. Things could not have been any more obvious, and you didn't even need to look very deep at all to find them. That the Western media somehow nonetheless continued and still continue to act like there's any validity to the accusations against Lula just shows how complicit they were in all of this throughout. Anyway, so in June 2019, The Intercept, led by one Glenn Greenwald, who at the time was still only halfway towards ruining his now completely ruined reputation, blew the lid off it all in a series of leaks that they revealed to the public. The Car Wash team had a secret Telegram chat group where the prosecution conspired with Judge Moro on every facet of their targeting of Lula and the Workers' Party from start to finish. The chats revealed one, clear collaboration between judge and prosecutors. Moro spoke in the chat as if he himself were a member of the prosecution team.

**[55:36]:** He suggested to the prosecutors that his team change the sequence of who they would investigate, insisted on less downtime between raids, gave strategic advice and informal tips, provided the prosecutors with advanced knowledge of his decisions, offered constructive criticism of prosecutorial findings, and even scolded Dallagnol as if the prosecutor worked for the judge. Two, Moro went shopping for potential witnesses on Lula's case and passed them along to the prosecution. Moro himself talked to these witnesses on the phone to assess their potential usefulness to their case, then relayed the prosecution their contact info and his opinion on them. This is all especially funny given that Judge Moro and Chief Prosecutor Dallagnol repeatedly denied any collaboration between them. Moro, who for years in this Telegram chat participated in the prosecutors investigation and strategized with them on how best to prosecute Lula, said in 2016 that, "I do not have any investigative strategy at all.

**[56:35]:** The people who investigate or who decide what to do and such is the public prosecutor and the federal police. The judge is reactive. We say that a judge should normally cultivate these passive virtues, and I even get irritated at times. I see somewhat unfounded criticism of my work saying that I am a judge investigator." And Dallagnol said that Moro always evaluated the prosecution's requests in an impartial and technical manner and remained impartial during the entire process of Lula's conviction. Three, the prosecution, despite being confident in public about the strength of their case, in private had major doubts about their ability to prove any of the charges they accused Lula of. Dallagnol, for example, said in the Telegram chat, "I am apprehensive about the connection between Petrobras and enrichment, and I am apprehensive about the apartment story. These are points in which we have to have solid answers on the tip of our tongues.

**[57:34]:** So, he was well aware that the evidence for both the supposed connection to Petrobras, which if you recall was what their claim to jurisdiction was based on, as well as the entire fabricated narrative surrounding the apartments was anything but sufficient. In spite of this clear doubt, he was nonetheless hell-bent on going forward with the case anyway, saying that the team needed to have on the tips of their tongues a consistent story to justify said claims. Four, the chats revealed that the Car Wash team were very invested in the ensuring Bolsonaro's victory in the 2018 election. For example, some journalists wanted to interview Lula from prison regarding his opinions on the 2018 election. The Car Wash team did everything possible to try and prevent this in a highly irregular manner, citing undefined security concerns. There was no special law against interviewing prisoners, and interviews with convicted murderers, drug traffickers, etc.

**[58:31]:** held in high-security prisons were permitted all the time. Yet, Lula had been kept practically incommunicado since he had been put in jail months earlier. Denying journalists the ability to interview Lula, held in a low-security prison and convicted of a non-violent crime, was clearly politically motivated. 10 days before the first round of the presidential election, a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice ruled that there was no reason to prevent interviews with Lula, paving the way for a potential bombshell interview that could have influenced the course of the election. On hearing about this decision, the secret Telegram chat erupted. The Car Wash team was terrified of the effect that an interview with Lula could have on the election, and discussed how they could prevent it from happening or mitigate its effect if it did. One prosecutor said, "I remain very worried about the potential return of the Workers' Party, but I have prayed frequently for God to enlighten our population and for a miracle to save us.

**[59:28]:** And Chief Prosecutor Dallagnol responded to her with, "I'm with you, Carol." So, the Chief Prosecutor on the Lula case just straight-up said that he wanted to prevent the Workers' Party from returning to power. Laura Tesla, another Car Wash prosecutor, complained that a press conference before the second round of voting could help elect Haddad. Haddad was the Workers' Party presidential candidate who they had chosen to replace Lula after he was jailed. The next day, when the right-wing Novo Party appealed the Supreme Court decision to allow Lula to be interviewed, which assured that it would be delayed until after the election, the Car Wash team celebrated and expressed their relief. Their partiality could not possibly be more obvious. Five, Moro directly coached the prosecution on their engagements with the media. He, for example, told Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima, a prosecutor on the case, that "Maybe tomorrow you should prepare a press release to point out supposed contradictions in Lula's arguments."

**[1:00:31]:** Moro had told them to do this in reaction to Lula's defense team holding their own press conference about the case the previous day. The judge, who is supposed to be impartial and unbiased towards either the defense or the prosecution, derisively called this the defense putting on a little show and told the prosecution that they needed to do something to counter it. This interaction happened after Moro had asked Lima his opinion following a day of court proceedings against Lula. "What did you think?" Judge Moro asked him. "I thought it went really well," Prosecutor Santos Lima responded, as if they were on the same team. Moro's request was then forwarded to Head Prosecutor Dallagnol, who reacted by saying that the prosecution needed to talk to the media to create comfort for the judge, to take the spotlight away from him, give him protection, and shift the focus away from him, and to counterbalance the defense's show, just as Moro had told them to.

**[1:01:30]:** Six. The Telegram leaks revealed a disgusting and sadistic, very personal hatred for Lula and his family among the prosecutors and judges who worked together to put him into jail. When Lula's wife suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died soon following a car wash raid on her house, the car wash team quickly mocked her death. Prosecutor Januario Paludo speculated that she had been killed to eliminate witnesses against Lula. Prosecutor Jerusa Visili said, "Do you guys want me to stay for the funeral?" Smiley face. Paludo later reiterated his earlier claim that Leticia had been killed to eliminate witnesses, saying that, "I always had my doubts about the supposed aneurysm. It just doesn't pass the smell test." While Carlos Welter lamented that Leticia's death made her a martyr and freed her to go to hell without ever facing consequences. Lula also lost two more family members during his imprisonment.

**[1:02:27]:** And each time, the secret Telegram chat erupted with sadistic jokes and complaints from the supposedly impartial and not politically motivated car wash team that Lula would dare to want to attend their funerals. When Lula's brother died, Dallagnol immediately complained that, "He will want to go to the funeral. If he goes, it will be a huge riot." After Lula's request to attend was denied, the decision was celebrated, and Paludo said, "The bastard just wanted to go for a walk." A few months later, Lula's 7-year-old grandson died. The immediate reaction of prosecutor Visili was to say, "Prepare for a new soap opera about Lula wanting to go to the wake." After Lula got permission to attend his grandson's funeral, prosecutor Roberson Pozzobon mocked him, saying that going to the funeral was just a strategy to humanize himself, as if that were even possible in his case. LOL.

**[1:03:25]:** Seven, the chats reveal even more evidence of the USA's involvement in Operation Car Wash with head prosecutor Dallagnol calling Lula's jailing a gift from the CIA. Eight, the chats reveal even more evidence that the Car Wash team was hoping to use their new found fame to get rich quick. On top of trying to form the aforementioned consultancy firm from lucrative multi-million-dollar kickbacks from the USA, they also started organizing secret paid speeches to executives of banks and multinational companies, some of which they were concurrently supposedly in charge of investigating. Dallagnol himself wrote in the Telegram group, "Let's organize congresses and events and make a profit, okay? It's a good way to take advantage of our networking and visibility." And he once invited the other prosecutors to a private event held by an investment firm promising his colleagues $7,000 each for their attendance. He estimated that in 1 year, he would make $106,000 from Car Wash related speaking fees and book royalties.

**[1:04:33]:** For comparison, the average yearly wage in Brazil is around $6,000.

**[1:04:40]:** So, in summary, the leaked messages revealed the clearest bias imaginable, clear political motivations, especially regarding the 2018 election, and direct collaboration between prosecutors and judges throughout Lula's case. They also reveal a sadistic hatred of Lula that was shared among the team that was responsible for prosecuting and judging him, provide further evidence of the pervasive involvement of the US government, and further show that everyone involved sought to profit from the Lula case. Lula was subsequently released on November 8th, 2019 after a Supreme Court ruling that he could not be jailed before exhausting the entire appeals process. This was followed up by other Supreme Court rulings that decided that Judge Moro was biased against Lula, as well as the aforementioned rulings in São Paulo that Lula had never owned the apartment in the first place, and that he had in fact backed out of the purchase in 2015.

**[1:05:38]:** The finding that Moro was biased against Lula meant that all of his cases and rulings against him were annulled. They left open the possibility to retry Lula on the same charges in Brasília, the country's capital. However, Brazil's Supreme Court also ruled that the leaked Telegram chats would be admissible as evidence in a retrial. And given that the chats make it even more obvious that the case had always been a joke from the very beginning, it is unlikely that any prosecutor would be stupid enough to give it another go, and thus far none have tried. Yet even during and after the Telegram leaks, even as Car Wash was being unraveled by a series of highly embarrassing Supreme Court decisions in favor of Lula and against the prosecutors and judges who had for years been painted by the international media as valiant superheroes of justice, the Western media still continued to downplay just how thorough the destruction of the Car Wash narrative had actually been.

**[1:06:36]:** Journalist Brian Mier demonstrated this when he went over some of their responses in a further dissection of the American and British media's reaction to Lula's 2019 release. On the day Lula was released, Bloomberg ran an article which does not mention the legal collusion between judge and prosecutors. It states instead, "The ex-president was convicted of corruption in 2017 and lost two appeals since then, but he has not exhausted the entire process. He has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and has said he's the victim of political persecution. The Washington Post first article on Lula's release also failed to mention the corruption scandal which has enveloped Lava Jato. In two articles about Lula's release, the BBC likewise ignored the illegal collusion between judge and prosecutors in Lava Jato. On the day Lula was released, The Guardian, whose Latin American editor Tom Phillips wrote 22 articles normalizing Bolsonaro in October 2018 in the lead up to the elections, made the editorial decision to rerun an AP article that makes

**[1:07:41]:** no mention of the leaked social media conversations. One day later, The Washington Post's Tom Phillips, who was one of the biggest cheerleaders for Lula's political imprisonment in the international media, briefly mentioned The Intercept revelations and Moro's ethical problems in the context of an article that misrepresented Lula's conviction as being connected to money laundering and ended with an uncritical treatment of other frivolous charges against the former president. With his political rights restored, Lula was able to run in the 2022 presidential elections, where he beat Jair Bolsonaro among other candidates.

**[1:08:18]:** The 100% definitely apolitical former judge, Sergio Moro, initially planned to run for president himself, expecting to ride his car wash fame and his time having been a minister in Bolsonaro's government to the highest office. But when polls indicated that he'd only get 8% of the votes, he decided to drop out and endorse Bolsonaro instead, of course. Given the endless brutal attacks that we've outlined here, not just on Lula, but also on the Workers' Party in general, Lula's win was a complete miracle. The right-wing persecution campaign against the Workers' Party received massive backing from the Brazilian and international media and was backed by the USA, the world's premier imperialist superpower, from the very beginning. While the right-wing did illegitimately win around six years in Brazil's presidency as a result, counting the terms of both Temer and Bolsonaro, they still somehow managed to lose in the end, despite having every advantage imaginable on their side,

**[1:09:18]:** aside from the truth, of course. There is really no overstating just how catastrophic of a defeat Lula's return to the Brazilian presidency is for the Latin American right-wing and American imperi alism. That they couldn't destroy his and the Workers' Party's reputations to the point of electoral unviability after their more than half a decade-long transnational warfare and defamation campaign is just embarrassing. Lula and the Workers' Party are often criticized from the left for being a bit milk toast and leaning more towards the center than what some would like. And this is true, but given the circumstances that they're in, it's really a miracle that they're even still a political force at all. If they were the victims of such a long-standing dirty campaign backed by a globe-spanning disinformation campaign and the USA, then imagine how much worse the reaction would be if they were further to the left.

**[1:10:11]:** This was not simply an everyday electoral victory. It is evidence that even in the third world and even in the most dire circumstances, victories can be won against the right and the imperialism that props them up. It's comical that now the media and US government have in the last year or so shifted towards an anti-Bolsonaro position while still, of course, lying by omission to paint Lula as nonetheless having been vaguely corrupt somehow. It's especially ridiculous given that the current US president was Obama's vice president when they started supporting Operation Car Wash. This shift is temporary and has only happened due to domestic political expediencies in the USA. The Democrats could not optically get away with supporting Bolsonaro now, given that they've spent years denouncing Trump as a uniquely bad anomaly. This is because Bolsonaro and Trump were famously close friends and allies, with Bolsonaro even modeling some of his public persona on Trump, and his supporters clearly took inspiration from the American January 6th riots in their own storming of

**[1:11:16]:** the Brazilian capital. Bolsonaro also, crucially, was trying to baselessly cast doubt on the results of the 2022 Brazilian election before that ever happened, in much the same way Trump did in the US back in 2019. So, the Biden government's sudden opposition to him is simply because doing anything else would be politically unviable, not because they actually disagree with his policies, rather because of how bad it would look. They played a key role in attempts to destroy the Workers' Party in the first place. Remember, the DOJ and FBI started meeting regularly with the Car Wash team in 2015 and started cooperating with them at the very beginning of in 2014, during the Obama-Biden administration, and Trump and Pence inherited the operation from them. It was very much a bipartisan initiative. The Democrat-aligned parts of the mainstream US media, who are now suddenly feigning shock at the threat that the right-wing poses to Brazilian democracy, were themselves key to Bolsonaro's rise to power and the attempted destruction of the Workers' Party,

**[1:12:19]:** something which weirdly goes unmentioned in the multitude of nauseating "How did it come to this? We have no idea." articles that they've posted since January 8th. Bolsonaro's actual policies, and in particular his economic policies of mass privatization, the destruction of public services, and serving the interests of international companies, are exactly the sort that the USA would like to see implemented across Latin America and the world. This aspect of US foreign policy always has been and always will be, totally bipartisan. Right now, for example, the Biden government is still running cover for the 2019 far-right coup in Bolivia, where a Trump-backed, pro-free market government came to power after the military forced Evo Morales of the MAS party to step down. This government was then embarrassed just a year later when, despite using the full power of the state apparatus to try and drum up support for themselves, and despite the enthusiastic support of the USA, EU, and the international media,

**[1:13:23]:** that same MAS party came right back to beat them in new elections in a landslide. The US under Biden, along with the rest of their Western allies, have since still been running cover for the coup, especially by complaining incessantly about the fact that the coup leaders are being brought to justice for their crimes, including for multiple massacres they ordered of indigenous people. And they're presenting these mass murderers facing completely overwhelming evidence of their guilt as if they're the real victims here. Biden's State Department has released multiple so-called human rights reports to this tune, while Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has stated that he is concerned for the fair trials of the US-backed theocratic fascists. Yet to this day, the US government, not under Trump nor under Biden, has said a single thing about the dozens of protesters they murdered. Meanwhile, articles in outlets like the New York Times adopt the same sympathetic framing for these theocratic fascist killers, all because they like their economics more.

**[1:14:28]:** So, there's no real discord between the US government, whether it happens to be Republican or Democrats, and the policies of Bolsonaro and other similar right-wing Latin American leaders. As long as they're willing to do what the US wants them to economically, and don't make openly supporting them impossible as Bolsonaro did, the US will do everything it can to undermine the left and bring the right into power. The second the Brazilian right rallies behind a leader who's more Romney-esque than Trump-esque, don't be surprised when the US sends more alphabet agency employees over to Brazil for some more secret meetings on how best to overthrow the Workers' Party and help get that guy into power. And don't be surprised when the international media tries to revive the completely debunked corruption narrative, whose threads they're still unwilling to let go of, or whatever other excuse they decide to go with.

**[1:15:20]:** The clear and obvious BS that Car Wash always was should also make you question the way that claims of corruption are constantly weaponized to attack the Latin American left. Car Wash is not unique, as the candid admission cited earlier about the US hoping to copy it in the rest of the region already made clear. Allegations of corruption are constantly used as a tool of lawfare against the left across Latin America in much the same way as they were in Brazil, though not always with as much success or fanfare. Right-wing aligned prosecutors are constantly trying to create narratives of corruption out of nothing in cases that they know fully well they have no real evidence for that would have no chance of succeeding except before similarly politically aligned judges. And even if they're destined to fail, the media nonetheless love to report on mere allegations as if they're true, which creates a perception of corruption anyway, ensuring that large parts of the population, and especially highly uncritical international audiences,

**[1:16:20]:** are convinced of libelous narratives conjured out of thin air that they've never seen any actual evidence for. And on the off chance that prosecutors manage to hit the jackpot and land judges who are just as politically compromised as they are, they can just submit a crudely drawn MS Paint picture of a butt as evidence and get a guilty verdict because the proof doesn't matter. The next time you see a New York Times or Washington Post or The Guardian article about some corruption allegations in Latin America, keep all of this in mind. If you want to form an opinion on it, you should actually take a very thorough look at the evidence yourself directly, rather than just the narrative that's being peddled around it by the prosecution and the media. Far more often than not, you'll find that there is absolutely nothing there at all. It's a very simple thing to do.

**[1:17:08]:** So, that the journalists mainstream media never actually do so is very intentional. There's clear reasons as to why the international media was in such a furor over Car Wash, yet has never mentioned things like the fact that the former president of Argentina and current leader of its right-wing opposition inherited his family businesses that were built off being granted lucrative contracts by the country's US-backed dictatorship that murdered 30,000 people, nor how he pardoned said family businesses of $4.5 billion worth of debt that they owed to the state while he was the president, or why they've said basically nothing about the fact that the current right-wing president of Uruguay contracted American private military firms to spy on opposition senators, or that he had the country's migration ministry track the movements of his ex-wife and report them to him, or that the prosecutor investigating these allegations against him deleted further compromising evidence simply because he asked her to.

**[1:18:12]:** Yet, if a left-leaning politician is so much as accused of buying a pair of jeans with his ministerial credit card, there is an international media uproar. If it's a politician whose economics and geopolitics they are aligned with, the international media will report completely made-up allegations as fact without feeling any need to even glance at the actual evidence, let alone explain it to you. But, for incredibly well-evidenced and infinitely more severe allegations against their guys, you'll barely even hear a peep. In fact, most of the time, they're never even investigated. The reason for this, apart from the obvious just favoring people they agree with thing, is because there is a concerted drive, particularly in Latin America, to associate the very notion of corruption with a specific set of economic policies, namely any sort of state economic regulation or participation, nationalizations, taxation, and redistributive policies. The point of doing this is not solely to persecute left-leaning political figures and try to take them out of the picture.

**[1:19:13]:** While that's clearly a big part of it, it goes much deeper than that. It's part of an ideological war, an attempt to spread the narrative that if the state spends money to do good things for human beings, that's actually just a front for corrupt politicians who support such policies not because they want to do good things that people want and that help them, but rather because they just want the state to have more resources so that there's more for them to steal. By this logic, the very notion of things like taxation, social spending, workers' rights, state companies, and regulations on business are therefore, in of themselves, associated with corruption and painted as its root cause. So, the fight against corruption narrative is far more than simply targeting supposedly corrupt individuals or reforming the systems that breed it, like campaign financing laws designed to hand corporations and the rich even more massively disproportionate power than they

**[1:20:10]:** already have. Rather, to truly fight it, so the narrative goes, the only option is to neoliberalize the state, abolish worker protections and corporate taxation, dismantle social welfare programs, privatize everything, etc. Because the less the state has, the less there is to be stolen from it. In summary, for them, fighting corruption actually means reforming the state to the point that it only subsidizes and protects the rich and their businesses and furthers their interests. This might sound familiar to you because it was the exact sort of narrative that was used to justify Dilma's overthrow. She spent state funds to help poor people, people voted for her because she did good things for them that they liked. The state helping poor people is just a front for corruption. It can't be anything more than a ploy to win re-election and to make such policies more popular so that they can then be expanded and corrupt politicians can therefore have more state money to loot.

**[1:21:06]:** Ergo, it doesn't matter that we failed to actually link her with any corruption, she's corrupt and that's grounds for impeachment. So, the narrative of a fight against corruption is not actually a fight against corruption at all, but rather a fight for neoliberalism. It is a way to further the notion that the state should just leave everyone to their fate and instead dedicate itself to subsidizing and protecting the rich and their businesses while simultaneously attacking and potentially getting rid of political opponents who are considered obstacles to these goals. In summary, they want to implement political programs that benefit very few people at the cost of everyone else. But obviously, that's not exactly a very compelling thing to campaign on. If it were simply a contest of which side has the best policies that benefit the most people, they'd lose every time. So, instead, their strategy is to spread the notion that the other guys who actually want to do things to help the average person are somehow bad.

**[1:22:05]:** In this case, by associating said things with a vague notion of corruption. This can then be used to legitimize coups or even simply to outright win elections entirely through negative campaigning with the help of the mainstream media. So, the fight against corruption narrative is just as much of a red herring as other modern struggles against concepts that are commonly used to legitimize all kinds of actions in their name and distract from the real structures of power that hurt people. Most prominently with the war on drugs and war on terror. As Flávia Soares Julius wrote, "The way that Car Wash dealt with corruption was as effective as the war on drugs or war on terror." Individuals are targeted and jailed while the structure that caused the matters remains intact. In Brazil, moralist discourses against corruption come from the same people who supported and joined the government of President Bolsonaro, who is involved with right-wing death squads.

**[1:23:02]:** The status quo that fights drug trafficking is the same status quo that consumes the drugs and sells weapons to the dealers. Car Wash rightfully punished some individuals involved with corruption. However, it never attacked the structure of power that really oppresses Brazilians. Instead, it confronted the party that actually took measures to address this oppression, illegally persecuting Lula and Rousseff. Another huge effect of Operation Car Wash was caused by its targeting of Brazil's state oil company, Petrobras, and of the local construction sector. As mentioned earlier, Petrobras has long been considered a problem by the USA due to its dominance of the Brazilian energy market, which they want access to, its status as a competitor of their companies in international markets, and its dealings with countries whose people they're trying to starve to death via sanctions, and thus have unilaterally decided that no one should be allowed to trade with, like Venezuela.

**[1:23:58]:** The Car Wash team seemed to operate with the intent of compromising the general operations of its targeted companies, allowing foreign companies to swoop in and take over once the dust had settled. As a consequence of this, significant control of Petrobras was ceded to US government officials, and it was left unable to handle the full extent of its previous operations, which meant that parts of Brazil's energy sector were opened up to private contractors to cover these new gaps, just as the US had long wanted. A study from one of Brazil's largest unions estimated that Car Wash, all up, resulted in the loss of 4.4 million jobs and 33 billion dollars worth of local investment.

**[1:24:41]:** So, let's conclude by summarizing everything that we've gone over here into some neat little bullet points. The USA has a long, long history of interfering in Brazilian politics to benefit the right wing, which they continued after they decided that Lula and the Workers' Party had economic and foreign policies that were not to their liking in the early 2000s. This led the US government to spy on the Brazilian government and Petrobras in a scandal that was revealed in 2013, and which was likely going on for much longer beforehand. In 2014, Operation Car Wash began. It targeted Petrobras and the Workers' Party, just as the USA had already been doing for years, as its team held regular secret meetings with FBI and DOJ officials. The Car Wash team constructed an image of themselves as a political superheroes with the enthusiastic help of the Brazilian and international media.

**[1:25:34]:** This image of infallibility enabled them to create trumped-up charges against anyone they wanted, which they would later weaponize against Lula. The general just sort of vibe of corruption that the Car Wash team and the media had spread enabled the right wing to impeach and overthrow Dilma, Lula's successor, in 2016. The reason for her impeachment was unimportant, as was the fact that there was absolutely no evidence implicating her in any actual corruption, as by this point vague implications alone were sufficient. Hence, they went for the completely ridiculous charge that she had paid for social programs on credit and then repaid that credit, a charge that even the anti-Workers' Party US media had huge difficulties trying to justify. Following this, Dilma's unelected replacement, Michel Temer, immediately began implementing policies that destroyed many of the achievements of the previous 16 years of actually elected Workers Party governance without anything resembling the popular legitimacy to do so.

**[1:26:35]:** This was the neoliberal reform campaign that the right-wing and their US allies had long been desperate for, carried out in an entirely undemocratic fashion. The Car Wash team then moved to try and convict Lula for the express purpose of ensuring that he couldn't run in the 2018 election, knowing that otherwise he would win. They did this by filing as many frivolous cases as possible before eventually settling on one surrounding a completely regular apartment purchase that Lula and his wife had already backed out of, and a supposed upgrade that they had received, which they had actually refused, and which was offered to them when Lula wasn't even a public official. They twisted this into a story of Lula having been given an apartment as a bribe in exchange for awarding lucrative contracts to a construction company. They then engaged in blatant jurisdiction shopping, making frivolous claims that they claimed justified them moving Lula's case from the relevant jurisdiction of São Paulo to Paraná, where nothing related to the alleged crime had ever occurred.

**[1:27:37]:** They did this to ensure that they could try the case before their own judge, and thus convict Lula in a case which was never actually even a case. As they never even came close to establishing the most basic facts regarding it, such as when this had supposedly happened, or any material evidence that Lula had ever actually owned the apartment in any respect. Luckily, they didn't actually need any evidence as the verdict was being decided by their own judge, who of course convicted Lula and sent him to jail anyway. All throughout this process, the partiality of the Car Wash team and the irregularities that they were committing were plain to see, and many were talking about it, yet the international media chose to cheerlead for them anyway. Leaked chats between the prosecutors and Judge Moro subsequently made those already obvious facts undeniable. The prosecution had colluded with the judge throughout the entire case.

**[1:28:28]:** They were on the same team. Additionally, the chats show that members of the Car Wash team had hoped that the Workers' Party would lose the 2018 election, proving them to be as partial as had always been claimed. Judge Moro also hilariously immediately joined Bolsonaro's government as Minister of Justice, later tried to run for president in the 2022 election, and upon dropping out, backed Bolsonaro. These undeniable facts showed the allegations against Lula as the farce that they were, and exposed Operation Car Wash as the political operation it always had been.

**[1:29:02]:** All of the frivolous cases against Lula were subsequently thrown out, and the conviction that had put him in prison was annulled. But the damage was already done. Bolsonaro had already been elected as a result, and the right-wing got to complete an entire 4-year term in the presidency that they never would have been able to get otherwise. Car Wash was, in summary, a US-backed lawfare campaign to destroy Brazil's electoral left-wing. It failed at that aim, but it nonetheless managed to get right-wingers into the presidency for more than 6 years, from 2016 until 2020. For most of its duration, Car Wash received almost fanatical devotion from most of the Brazilian and Western mainstream media, with its team being turned into worldwide celebrities and treated as real-life superheroes. So, the answer to the questions being asked by the US and other Western media after the January 8th riot in Brasilia, like what drove the mass attack on Brazil's capital, and how did we get here?

**[1:30:02]:** Is pretty simple. You. We got here because of you. It's not even remotely the first time, either, and it definitely won't be the last. The US backing of Car Wash was sadly just one more chapter in the USA's bipartisan, ongoing, and seemingly never-ending assaults on the lives and basic well-being of Latin Americans. Fittingly, Bolsonaro seems to have now retired to Florida, which is the preferred safe haven of Latin America's elite, who often flee their countries to a warm welcome in the US after trying to organize military coups, blowing up airliners full of civilians, or in response to a left-leaning government slightly raising their taxes. From there, they use that ill-gotten riches to fund attempts at subversion back home, while the US just lets them do so and often helps them do so. The Democrats' furor over Bolsonaro being in the US, which is driven solely by the fact that he's outwardly too similar to Trump, might, in this isolated case, result in the USA actually doing something about his presence there, but

**[1:31:04]:** in general, the USA protects their own. Their subversion attempts in Latin America are always underpinned by the guarantee that if things go awry, their reactionary allies will always be welcome to retreat to a mansion in Orlando or Miami, from which they can fund death squads to continue the struggle against evil totalitarian communist measures such as treating black and indigenous people like human beings or giving $50 monthly stipends to poor mothers. Anyway, that's the end of the video. This was an important topic to cover, and now I've covered it. If you like this video, subscribe to my channel for more, and consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-fi so that I can make more long-form stuff like this. Thanks for watching. Thanks very much to all of my supporters, and especially my $25-plus supporters, Gel Cripson, A Big Mean Cat, Potter, Mischief and Finns, Brosnan, Ace Mallard, Evan Carroll, William Tomlinson, Arthur Simak Jones, Diego X, Jake Childress, Robo Kami, Exos,

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